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The reporters were using battery-operated lights for their cameras, and stood in a halo beyond which was the kind of darkness — and silence — few people have experienced since before the industrial revolution.

Images filmed earlier, in daylight, showed entire neighborhoods flooded with raw sewage, as the pumps in the water treatment plant stopped working, due to a lack of fuel.

Drinking water has become dangerously toxic. Children, already weakened by malnutrition, suffer from diarrhea, kidney diseases and many other debilitating effects, all preventable, deliberately inflicted on them by Israel’s malice, for the sole reason that they are not Jewish children.

After a day of crowds waiting in line for some precious bread, by nightfall the bakeries were empty: no more flour, no more fuel, no more bread. Those lucky enough to have bread, rushed home to feed their families by the light of equally-precious candles.

80% of Gazans are dependent on UNRWA for their food. UNRWA announced that they might be obliged to stop distributing food as early as Wednesday, due to the Israeli closures.

In the freezing cold, overcrowded hospitals, patients and their families prayed that the equipment that kept them alive, would continue to receive electricity. They prayed that the hospital would have the medicines they needed. Their prayers were unanswered. Already, dozens of patients have died as a direct result of Israel’s deliberately genocidal policy.

I saw hospital rooms lit by candles, screaming children being treated in the dark by doctors, as their parents tried to help with lights from their cell-phones.

While the zionist killers whine about missiles fired from Gaza, which have caused a total of 19 Israeli casualties in more than seven years, Israeli missiles, war-planes, bombs and tanks have caused thousands of Palestinian deaths, destroyed thousands of homes, roads, the main electricity plant, Gaza’s airport, hospitals, schools, and essential government buildings. They have left almost a quarter of a million human beings permanently crippled, while destroying the infrastructure that would have allowed their families to care for them properly.

They have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from these desperately poor people, they have destroyed precious agricultural crops, Gaza’s almost 3,800 factories have shut down for lack of fuel and access to the outside world, and they have prevented donors from coming to their rescue.

Israeli prisons are filled with Palestinian political prisoners and innocent civilians, including children, all of whom are tortured, most of whom have not been charged with any crime.

Never before, in the history of humankind, has an ethno-supremacist state deliberately perpetrated a murderous siege against 1.5 million human beings solely because of their ethnicity, in full view of the world.

Never before, has the world watched and listened in real time, as an entire people was ethnically-cleansed so that their land and resources could be stolen by foreign settlers, with the settlers viewed as the victims, and the victims viewed as the aggressors.

Never before has one side been guilty of so many specific, documented, severe violations of law, and yet been hailed as a democracy and a civilized, peace-loving nation, and received so much material, political and military support from the world’s democracies.

Never before have so many otherwise decent people, living in free democracies, been so genuinely afraid of speaking out against atrocities committed by a state against civilians, for fear of being labeled racists.

We’re being bullied now into thinking that we have a ‘moral duty’ to intervene in other people’s governments when they don’t meet our human rights standards.But as Jean Bricmont points out in his book Humanitarian Imperialism(translated from French by Diana Johnstone), imperialism has a way of using everything it can to further its own ends.And since it’s power that gets to define what a human rights standard is, the powerless don’t get much of a look in

That bullying is effective.For example, how many Democrats do you know who would challenge their own party when it says, sanctimoniously, that we can’t just ‘cut and run’ now that Iraq has descended into chaos?How many people hesitate to argue when someone at a dinner party passionately urges military intervention to solve some problem somewhere else?How many people, even though well meaning as hell, have become completely blind to the fact that, in the world, we the privileged ones are not the Subject that brings Peace, Democracy, and Goodness to the rest of the world, which is then reduced to an Object that we’re supposed to maintain?Just about everybody you know, probably.I certainly get confused about it.

Fortunately, Jean Bricmont has painstakingly separated out the confusing threads that make up our present tie to militarization.He talks about how ideology rather than force is the preferred invisible instrument of control in a democratic society.He lays out the costs of the imperialism we practice without naming it, even to ourselves.He sets out a series of questions to those who would use human rights as an argument for war.For example, he wants to know if they are willing to accept responsibility for torture.Torture, as Bricmont points out, is a direct result of war.“An army that finds itself the target of resistance fighters who are like fish in the sea is inexorably led to try to gain information by force.If one calls for military intervention, one is calling for war and occupation, and in that case, in effect calling for torture.”And Bricmont is not fuzzy minded about torture:he knows that it works.The French dismantled the rebellion in Algeria using torture, even if it didn’t help them to maintain ultimate control.And it certainly has worked in crushing rebellions against American interests in Latin America.But, as he points out, in those scenarios, “no serious person can see bright prospects for human rights.”So the question is:if you’re for preemptive and ‘humanitarian’ war, are you prepared to take the responsibility for what it sure to follow?Rape, massacre, torture — these are not the result of the brutal military mind.These are the inevitable (indeed, traditional, historical) results of war.If you want it, you got it.

Bricmont, with blessed ruthlessness, dissects our prevailing ideology:the ideology of the dinner party, of the glossy magazine, of the cult of personal growth, of everything that just wants to think of itself as good while letting its government get on with the murderous business as usual that lets us lead such pleasant lives here at home.He points out that imperialism (that’s us, guys, yep, that’s right, take a look at ourselves, that’s us, not the underdog no matter what stories we tell ourselves — the Empire) has a way of using everything it can to further its own ends.

“To function as an instrument of domination,” he says, “the human rights ideology calls for rewriting history, selective indignation, and arbitrary priorities.”In other words, only the powerful get to say what’s a violation of human rights and what’s not, with the inevitable result that, by definition, what the powerful does is not an abuse.But, he says, there’s also hope:“The paradox is that the more ethics advances toward a genuine universality — and the human rights ideology constitutes an advance in relation to previous ideologies — the more hypocritical the dominant power becomes.The current dominator powers have a more universalist discourse than, say, Genghis Khan; as a result, they need to be more hypocritical.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Vice President Dick Cheney had at one point considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site to provoke a retaliation, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday.

The news comes amid reports that Israel launched an air strike against Syria this month over a suspected nuclear site.

Citing two unidentified sources, Newsweek said former Cheney Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group several months ago that Cheney was considering asking Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

A military response by Iran could give Washington an excuse to then launch airstrikes of its own, Newsweek said.

Wurmser left Cheney’s office last month, the magazine reported. The steady departure of neoconservative hawks from the administration has also helped tilt the balance against war, it said.

Washington has been pursuing diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear program. It has refused to take military options off the table, even U.S. resources are taxed by having 169,000 troops in Iraq.

Although some intelligence sources say Iran is years away from nuclear capability, Israel believes that military action may be necessary as early as 2008, Newsweek said.

Israel has declined to comment on the reported air strike, while Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear aid and said it could retaliate for the September 6 violation of its territory.